Are there alien messages in the stars ?

Astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz believes that there could be something obvious we are missing.

Conventionally the search for intelligent alien civilizations has involved listening out for signals, but what if a sufficiently advanced alien race had found a way to use the flicker patterns of their own star to communicate a message ? This is the premise on which Walkowicz is basing new research designed to determine if there could be messages in the heavens that we've been missing all along.

Walkowicz and her team will be examining the archives from the Kepler mission to look for 'winking' stars and then use complex software algorithms to identify any unusual patterns. "We’ll get all sorts of things we understand," she said. "But we’ll also be looking for things that aren’t matched by well-known physical processes."

"The odds of a discovery with Walkowicz’s project may be long, but the search technique is quite straightforward."

As I see it, three options:
1) There is no signal, because there are no aliens.
2) There is no signal because while there are aliens, they are aware of both benign and malignant OTHER ET's, in which case a big strobe light in the sky may not be the best defensive strategy.
3) There is a signal, because the ones sending it are strong enough not to worry about any other race of ET's. And could devour our planet whole.
In any of these scenarios, we probably don't gain a ton by doing this research. On the upside, perhaps we discover something totally unrelated about the blinki... [More]

If this is a privately funded study then go for it! Why not? She wouldn't be wasting any tax money if some wealthy people want to fund her project.
If that's the case if be interested in hearing her findings. What's the worst that can happen... that we found out she was wrong and there is no message our that she is right, and we are being made fun of?

Advanced civilization in the universe must have some form of long range communication, it may be faster than ours and may not be affected by distance.
The "high-speed-communication" maybe moving too fast to detect.

is it more likly that listening for machine sounds would be productive . may i suggest that the sound of arc welders , genarators , microprocessors , stepper motors , and a million other rythemic and pattern signals which have nothing at all to do with communication might be found long before E.T. phoneing home is discovered .